Television Review

THE CLASSIC text of the anti-television movement is Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, which argues that by constantly submitting ourselves to the passive pleasures of television, we are destroying our capacity to think and feel.

There are times when you can feel that Postman didn't comprehend the full awfulness of Satan's little box: the really horrible thing is that television has achieved so powerful a grip on our attention that it doesn't even need to bother amusing us any more. As television expands into more channels, occupying more hours of the day, it offers less and less in the way of passive pleasures. Instead, it expects viewers to settle for passivity, pure and simple.

Take Cutting Edge: School for Seduction (C4), about a weekend course in flirting run by Peta Heskell, a former editor of Forum. The silliness of the whole enterprise became obvious in the first minute, as Heskell offered a demonstration of her own technique - strolling down the street shouting hello, giggling and rolling her eyes wildly at every male in earshot. What took a little longer to become apparent was the cruelty of it all. People who take courses in flirting are, in the nature of things, likely to be shy and socially awkward. Putting them on television, and getting their friends and ex's to comment on why they needed flirting lessons, did them no favours at all.

Paul, a gangling, beaky young man, was persuaded to prowl along the Erotica shelves of a bookshop for the benefit of the cameras. His ex-girlfriend, asked why she thought he needed flirting school; said "Paul's laugh is a bit too `huh-huh-huh-huh' for me." One of Heskell's exercises involved saying "Hello" seductively while chucking a tennis- ball to another student. Under the camera's gaze, Paul fumbled and threw wildly. Towards the end of the course, asked to select a symbolic animal through which he could "access his inner strength", Paul decided to think of himself as a lion - "ferocious, determined and powerful". In the circumstances, this couldn't but look absurd and pathetic. Likewise, his account, after the course, of a relationship with a girl called Tracy, which had been so successful that he had had to buy a new box of condoms.

Brian had a grey manner and a voice rather like John Major's. His mother told the cameras that she would like a daughter-in-law with lots of nice blonde hair: "Or a little redhead, a little saucy redhead." Sent out by Heskell to find a perfect stranger and pay her a compliment, Brian, after some difficulties, managed to tell a woman he liked the colour of her ice cream. After the course, he said he had gained enough confidence to feel able, next time he was in Safeway, to go up to a lady and tell her she was buying a particularly good brand of fish paste ("That's just one example. I'm sure there's more").

We also met Lucie, a pleasant, intelligent woman who showed a laudable reluctance to take the course remotely seriously; and Terrylee, a confident, attractive and married zoologist, who felt she didn't really belong on this course. It emerged that Terrylee had been attacked by men three times in the past, and was anxious that she might be sending out the wrong signals. The film passed on quickly, perhaps aware that this pointed up the idiocy of the rest of the programme.

What effect did this cringe-making programme expect to have on its audience? There seemed to be two alternatives: that we were expected to snigger at these people; or that we expected to have no emotional reaction at all - to just sit back and take it, regardless. I sort of hope it was the latter.

A similar uncertainty seemed to afflict Four Wheelbarrows and a Wedding (BBC1): this portrait of life at Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire seemed unsure whether it wanted to seduce the viewer with the upper-class glamour of the milieu, or foment class war. On the one hand, we were asked to thrill to the guest list at young Henry Dent-Brocklehurst's wedding (Liz Hurley! Tara Palmer-Tomkinson!); on the other, we were invited to compare his palatial residence with the cramped flats, lousy pay and unfulfilled ambitions of his staff. Whichever, the result was quite dull. Next April, I learn from the organisation White Dot, sees TV Turn-Off Week. After last night, I'm looking forward to it.